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In Chile’s Capital, Damage Is Inside and Invisible

The inside of Cecilia Painaqueo’s apartment in Santiago. Ms. Painaqueo and her four children have been camping outside.Credit
Fernando Rodriguez for The New York Times

SANTIAGO, Chile — From outside, there is no sign that the century-old building where Cecilia Painaqueo lived with her four children was damaged by one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. But inside her second-floor apartment, the bedroom walls collapsed and the wooden ceiling buckled.

Ms. Painaqueo, eight and a half months pregnant, said there were a lot of so-called casas de mentira, or houses that lie, in her central city neighborhood.

“You don’t see the damage by standing on the street,” she said. “You have to go inside.”

In many ways, her words sum up the state of Chile’s elegant, orderly capital 10 days after it was shaken by the 8.8-magnitude earthquake. While so much of the southern parts of this country lie in ruins, this city of high-rises and tree-lined boulevards appears mostly unscathed, a tribute, many say, to its strict building codes.

But many people in this city of 6.8 million still do not know if their lives will ever be the same. The worse off tend to be those left out of this country’s economic growth. They have also so far been left out of the government’s disaster relief efforts, focused mainly in the south.

Unsightly and unsafe camps, primarily occupied by Peruvian immigrants, have sprouted across the city’s historic center. In poor neighborhoods on the northern outskirts of the capital, thousands of people are still waiting for schools to reopen and basic services to be restored.

The poor are not the only ones living in limbo. Thousands of middle class families, without insurance or savings, have been forced to move in with friends and relatives after the quake left their shoddily built condominiums uninhabitable.

Ms. Painaqueo, a 36-year-old dishwasher, was forced to move her children — ages 17, 8, 7, and 15 months — and everything she could salvage from her apartment onto the sidewalk in front of her precarious building, still standing but not stable.

Neighbors lent her an umbrella to provide shade from the searing afternoon sunshine, and a tent to keep warm when the temperatures plunged at night.

High school students brought hot meals. And shopkeepers let her use their telephones and bathrooms.

Ms. Painaqueo said the authorities had offered to provide enough money to cover a month’s rent in a new apartment. But she would still need to come up with the security deposit, which amounts to about one-third of her $300 monthly salary. That felt like a slap in the face, she said.

“They are raising all this money to help people in the south,” Ms. Painaqueo said of the government, referring to a telethon last weekend that brought in some $59 million for earthquake victims. “But they have forgotten that there are victims in Santiago as well.”

Photo

A modern tower with structural damage underwent testing in Santiago. Many in Chile's capital are outraged at builders.Credit
Fernando Rodriguez for The New York Times

For decades, Chile’s economy has been marked by two things: dynamic growth and a gaping disparity between the rich and the poor. The first attribute goes a long way in explaining how so much of Santiago withstood a temblor that was hundreds of times stronger than the one that flattened Haiti’s capital in January.

The second attribute explains why the earthquake hit some families so much harder than others.

Less than five miles away from the old adobe neighborhood where Ms. Painaqueo spent her Sunday afternoon, the buildings in a section of the city known as “Sanhattan” are made from reinforced concrete and steel.

Within a single square block there is a W Hotel, a Brooks Brothers, a shop that specializes in imported European shoes and a World of Wine store.

A park in the center of the neighborhood was packed on Sunday with parents and children watching a puppet show and playing soccer.

It was hard to find anyone in the neighborhood who had been severely affected by the earthquake. But several people seemed shaken by what they described as “the second tremor,” when throngs of vandals looted stores and warehouses in the worst affected areas of the disaster zone.

The looting became so bad that the government deployed troops to regain control of the streets, the first time soldiers had been used for security purposes since this country’s former military dictatorship handed power to a civilian government in 1990.

“What we have experienced is similar to what the United States experienced after Hurricane Katrina,” said Elizabeth Perasio, a 30-year-old nurse and mother of two. “We like to think of ourselves as an advanced, stable society where people work together and help one another, not some backward, third world country.

“Now we are questioning what kind of country we really are,” she said.

That question weighed heavy on people’s minds across town at the Central Park condominium building, which stands 19 stories high and has sweeping northern views of the Mapocho River and the Andes. A sign hanging over the entrance read,
“Ground Zero.”
And camped out on the couches in the lobby were Jorge Ibarra and his wife, Elena Celis, who have spent every night there since the earthquake caused the tower to list to one side.

Mr. Ibarra, a sports reporter for a local Internet news site, said he could not move in with relatives because he bought a lot of new furniture for his condominium and he was afraid it might be stolen if he left it behind. And he could not afford a new condominium because he had spent all his savings on the damaged one.

“We thought when we made it to the middle class we were safe,” he said. “We were wrong.”

Back in the city’s historic center, Margarita Ravanal spent most of the weekend in a partly collapsed adobe building with her Peruvian husband. Then on Sunday night, she reported for work as a nanny in one of Santiago’s wealthiest neighborhoods, Las Condes.

Her employers are kind and generous, but have never asked whether she had been affected by the quake. Her eyes welling, Ms. Ravanal said they go on and on about how frightened they have felt since the earthquake.

“They don’t know anything about fear,” she fumed. “Fear is when you lose everything.”

Correction: March 11, 2010

An article on Tuesday about damage in Santiago, the capital of Chile, from the Feb. 27 earthquake misstated Santiago’s population. It is 6.8 million, not 3.3 million.

A version of this article appears in print on March 9, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Chile Capital, Damage Is Inside and Invisible. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe